During the four years from 1875 to 1875, there was a severe drought in the north, and crops failed in many areas, resulting in more than100000 people starved to death and more than 20 million victims fled the fields. The Westernization Movement was also seriously affected by this drought. At that time, China itself was a small-scale peasant economy. Farmers made a living by farming, not to mention drought. Even at ordinary times, it was difficult to get enough food and clothing.
There are also some other reasons. For example, at that time, the Qing Dynasty publicly allowed opium cultivation, and the profits brought by opium were much higher than those of crops, which led to a decrease in the area planted with grain and a sharp decrease in the original grain output, which was even worse in the drought year.
Whenever there is drought, there will be locusts. While the drought area is expanding, locusts are rampant. From north to south in Tianjin, locusts covered the sky and ate up all the withered crops. Is that all? There is evaporation, and it will rain sooner or later. In summer and autumn, it rains and floods continuously, and all kinds of disasters make people miserable.
According to the Records of Jiangnan County, there is a passage that says: "Hundreds of miles of bare land, rice seedlings are burned, grain is scarce, rice prices are soaring, and the poor are short of food: vegetable chaff is exhausted, followed by vegetation, and bark is dug up by the roots of hemp, fern and palm trees ..." What should I do if I can't live any longer? The victims took risks in order to survive, and some victims formed a "machete club" to carry out armed struggle to grab food.
However, after all, there are still many people who have not carried this natural disaster and fell on the dry land. It is not uncommon for people to eat people. More often, it is "no meat to eat, no right to chop people." When more and more people die, the plague will follow.
According to records, almost 10 people in Henan province were sick, 9 people were sick, and 23 people in Shanxi province 10 people died of plague. In this way, thousands of people collapsed in these four years of natural disasters. 1879 Although the drought in Shanxi continues, dew has fallen in Shandong, Shaanxi and other places, and the drought has come to an end. An earthquake made the devastated land even more desolate. Magnitude 8 occurred in Wudu, Gansu, with intensity 165438.
Four years later, drought, locust plague, plague and earthquake directly pushed the "Ding Wuqi Famine" to a terrible situation, with 200 million residents affected, and the number of people who died directly from famine and plague was as high as 6.5438+million. This disaster is a catastrophe in the history of the Chinese nation!